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SEPTEMBER 25, 2000 VOL. 156 NO. 12
a moving car: all the nearby scenery is a blur that starts to come into focus somewhere down the road. On the info highway, things move even faster, but with every passing kilometer, the promise of cyberspace becomes clearer. The year 2000 will turn out to have been a pivotal moment in the emergence of the Internet, a Darwinian shake-out in which the fittest inhabitants of cyberspace survived and thrived. The Internet will entertain us in fantastic new ways. When cyber moviemaking hits its stride, using broadband technology to become truly interactive, this year's Hollywood blockbuster will look as benighted as the first fumblings of the Lumiere brothers in fin-de-siecle Paris. When e-commerce is perfected, shopping malls and mail-order catalogs will have the antiquarian feel of the Greek agora. As we have seen this year with the introduction of new wireless protocols and devices, the Net is becoming increasingly portable. Old-style notions of geographybeing out of touch or off the gridwill seem like a relic from another age. Moore's Law famously holds that every 18 months, the power of the microchip doubles. But the people we have chosen for this month's chapter of innovatorssix Internet pioneers who toil in fields as far flung as the sociology of identity and the delivery of ice cream by bicycledemonstrate that there's a human corollary: our ability to harness technology in creative ways is something that increases just as rapidly. Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com TIME Asia home Quick Scroll: More stories from TIME, Asiaweek and CNN |
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